Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(19)

She whispers her husband’s name. She doesn’t want to wake him but she is feeling anxious, lonely.

The bed is larger than she recalls. Almost, she isn’t sure if her husband is there, at the farther (left) edge of the bed.

But he is there, seemingly asleep. His broad naked back to her.

Gently she eases against him, craving the touch of another. The protective arms of another.

Her husband appears to be sleeping undisturbed. Whatever the cry from the lake, he has not been wakened.

He has thrown off most of the covers, his shoulders and upper back are cool to the touch. Without opening his eyes he turns sleepily to her, to close his arms around her.

Strong and protective the husband’s arms. And his deep slow breathing a kind of protection as well. She lays her head beside his, on a corner of his pillow. In his sleep the husband does strange, sculptural things with pillows: bends them in two, sets them beneath his head vertically, merges two pillows into one, lies at an uncomfortable angle with his head crooked. Yet he sleeps soundly, the nocturnal birds rarely wake him.

Husband and wife are very comfortable together. Without needing to speak they communicate perfectly in their bed in the dark. The wife will claim that she is a light sleeper yet often she falls asleep close to the husband in this way, sharing just the edge of his pillow.

It is the purest sleep, sharing the edge of the husband’s pillow.

Close about the roof of the house are smaller birds. Cardinals are the first to wake at dawn. Their familiar, sweet calls are tentative, like questions. They are asking What is this? Where are we? What will be expected of us? It must be terrifying to be a bird, she thinks. You must forage for food every minute, you must never rest or your small heart will cease beating.

You must fly, you must exert your wings. Frail bones, that can be snapped so easily. Yet these bones are strong enough to lift you into the air and to buoy you aloft through your life.

These are the birds of day—birds whose songs are familiar to the ear. On the lake and in the marshy land bordering the lake are larger birds, mysterious birds, that cry, call, hoot, moan, shriek, murmur, and make quavering noises, harsh manic laughter through the night.

The screech owl, a singular shuddering cry.

The great blue heron, a hoarse croak of a cry.

Take my hand. And take care.

Hand in hand they are walking along the edge of the lake. The earth underfoot is soft, spongy. It is a chill May morning. Color is bleached from the earth as from the sky. Tall grasses at the water’s shore appear to be broken, trampled. There is a smell of wet rotted leaves. Though the season is spring it is a twilit time and all that she sees appears to be neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.

She is gripping her husband’s hand just slightly tighter than usual. Perhaps the husband is limping—just slightly. It is natural for the wife to weave her fingers through the husband’s fingers. He is the stronger of the two, she defers to him even in the matter of walking together. Soon after they’d met they began holding hands in this way and that was many years ago but in this twilight hour at the lake the wife is unable to calculate how long. A strange silence has come upon her like a veil tied tight against her mouth.

Come here! Look.

Carefully the husband leads the wife. Nearly hidden among tall grasses and cattails at the shore is what appears to be a little colony of nesting ducks—mallards.

These are the most common local ducks. The wife recognizes the sleek dark-green head of the male, the plain brown feathers of the female.

A light rain is falling, causing the surface of the lake to shiver like the skin of a living creature. The sun doesn’t seem to be rising in the east so much as materializing behind banks of cloud—pale, without color, sheer light.

She is gripping her husband’s hand. She thinks—We have never been so happy.

Has he brought her here, to tell her this? Why has he brought her here?

The lake at this hour appears different than it appears by day. It seems larger, lacking boundaries. Columns of mist rise, like exhaled breaths. By day you can see individual trees but in this dusk all is shadow like a smear of thick paint. And the surface of the lake reflecting only a dull metallic sheen.

A sun so hazy-pale, it might be the moon. (Is that the moon?) Obscured by clouds that appear to be unmoving, fixed in place.

There is something melancholy, the wife thinks, in such beauty. For the lake is beautiful, even drained of color. It is one of the beautiful places of her life, it has become precious to her. Though it is not a large lake in the mountains, only a semi-rural, semi-suburban lake of less than two miles in circumference, at its deepest no more than fifteen feet and much of the water near shore shallow, clotted with cattails.

It is difficult to walk along the lake, there is no single trail amid dense underbrush. Especially dense are stretches of Rosa acicularis, thorny wild rose that catch in clothing and raise bleeding scratches on unprotected skin.

Hand in hand walking along the shore. They have come to the end of their property and are making their way along a faint trail in the marsh. The wife is shivering, her feet are getting wet, she would like to turn back but the husband presses forward, he has something to show her. Through their long marriage it is the husband who has had much to show the wife.

Above the lake are flashes of lightning, soundless.

On the steel-colored lake are shadow-figures: a flotilla of Canada geese. The husband and wife stand very still observing the large handsome gray-feathered geese as they float on the surface of the water, heads tucked beneath their wings like illustrations in a children’s storybook.